The sweep is complete

The Rays swept the BoSox last night here at the Trop, though Kazmir wasn’t responsible for pullin’ it down (as Zac had suspected) near as much as Evan Longoria with his rally-starting 2 RBI double in the seventh. What a blast of a game, even with an insane running time of 4 hours. Easily the longest game I’ve ever been in attendance for. I snapped a few photos while we were there. The Rays are now 3.5 games up now heading into a series with Kansas City. The Rays are good enough now to actually go out to a pub to watch ‘em on TV, it’s exciting.

Weekend cookout

We cooked out on our new grill again this past weekend while watching Spain take out Germany in the Euro 2008 tournament. Here’s the rundown of what we threw on there:

• Barbecue-basted chicken drumsticks (one dozen)
• Marinated pork chops (8 or 9 of them)
• Bell peppers (2 reds, 1 orange, 2 greens)
• Hamburgers (2)
• Steak & vegetable kabobs (one dozen)
• Bratwurst (5)

All of that for 9 people. And that was just the stuff that went on the grill. We also busted out the new deep fryer and Colette fried up about 10 potatoes worth of french fries. Baller ass cookout if you ask me.

Rock Band notes, #2

Rock Band is owning me.

I haven’t even touched another game since I got it a couple weeks ago, and I’m completely okay with that.

So far in the Band World Tour mode, Colette and I have been playing in our band called Pommes Frites; her on guitar, me on drums, both of us decked out in our white and pink outfits. Sort of a White Stripes, but with two other members, pink instead of red, and a quality drummer (or so I consider myself).

With the announcement that Rock Band 2 is coming in September, it looks like we got into this game at just the right time. By the time we unlock all the in-game tracks in Rock Band and start to tire of them, the sequel will hit shelves, throwing another 50-ish tracks at us to tackle. Including the DLC tracks we’ve already picked up (I think about 20), that’ll put us to over 100 tracks to play on 4 different instruments. It’s insane, the potential size of this platform. I already envision them needing better sorting tools to pick a song quickly in Quickplay mode. Right now I’d like to request a feature for version 2: please let us load all of the in-game tracks onto the 360’s hard drive, so we don’t have to keep swapping discs to play each game’s songs. When I pop in the Rock Band 2 disc, I want to also see all of my downloaded tracks plus the original Rock Band ones. Please.

So let’s get to my most recent thoughts. The drums are the best part of the game, hands down. Better than guitar in any of the Guitar Hero games, and better than vocals. Maybe it’s because out of all the plastic instruments you can play, the drums most closely mimic actually playing drums. Or maybe it’s because I’m a rhythm guy, who knows. I definitely have an affinity for songs with lots of drumming in them. I’m to the point now on drums where I can hold my own on Hard mode in most of the simpler songs, but I’m still challenged plenty with Medium on the advanced drum songs. But the difficult ones are so much more satisfying. Any of the songs by Smashing Pumpkins, Rush, Boston, The Who, or The Police are still to painful for me to play on Hard, but a blast on Medium.

Colette’s still ripping up her dual-instrument skills on guitar/mic. I have no idea how she can play that. I tried drumming while singing Sabotage, and I almost failed out on the drums. Maybe she can use one eye to look at the words and one to see the note track. Chameleon style.

Tampa Bay is going for a sweep

We’re about to see a good showdown game: Tampa Bay going for a sweep, BoSox trying to fend one off. It’s shaping up to be quite a showdown. I’m thinking something along the lines of a Florida-Tennessee SEC championship game, or a Michigan-Ohio State match. Blood might be spilled and people might get ejected. Just what I’m looking for while sitting in the stadium drinking Miller Lite with my friends.

Rock Band notes, #1

So we got Rock Band as a wedding gift from Justin (decisive winner of the Most 3lit3 Wedding Gift contest). We spent just about all of our indoor time at our mini-honeymoon condo on the beach playing Rock Band, with Colette singing and guitaring, and me either guitaring or drumming. This being my first dabbling into the rhythm game genre, I thought I should write out some initial thoughts.

First I’ll talk about what I like:

Almost every aspect of the game is phenomenal. The first time I saw anyone rocking out to this game, I thought “damn all that stuff looks chincy, the guitar looks worse that the Guitar Hero ones and the drums will break in no time. Also it’ll get boring once you play all the songs.” Not so. The drums actually feel great for a “revision 1″ product. Future peripherals in Rock Bands 2 or 3 will be even better. And the track list is varied enough to provide lots of different options, and replaying them is only as annoying as your dislike for the specific song. For me that means there are only a few I generally avoid. Playing each instrument is pretty fun, but the funness rises an order of magnitude with each new person playing. 4-player bands are incredibly exciting, especially playing something like Tom Sawyer with everyone at least on Medium difficulty.

Now for something more negative:

The design of the Band World Tour mode is poor at best. It’s a blast when you want to do what the game wants you to do. However, when starting a band, whatever instruments you start with and whichever person is the leader are all settings that are stuck that way for eternity. I suppose it’s slightly more comparable to a real-life band that way, but mostly I find it completely annoying. Having to constantly sign in and out or switch bands in order to play a different instrument is just a pain. Can’t I just do whatever I want? The lack of a real “party mode” is basically inexcusable to me. When playing with new players just trying the game out (even on easy), if they fall out of the game, it’s game over for everyone. They need to have a party mode with no “fan approval” meter, or whatever it is, so that when a newbie is playing drums, they’re free to play without feeling like they’re losing the whole time. We also need better support for a single Live account to be able to sing and play guitar/bass/drums at once. Colette’s too good for one instrument!

We got in lots of game time over the past couple weeks. I’m getting pretty decent at drumming, but I think I’ve hit a difficulty wall: I can pretty much own every song on Medium, then I get owned the second I tread into Hard mode. Guess I need to practice my Fisher-Price drumming skills.

My favorite songs to play so far: the Rush songs, Gimme Shelter, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Weezer songs.

Back again: some highlights from June

June has been a crazy month. Here are some of the highlights:

• I got married.
• I got Rock Band and played the hell out of it.
• I got Guitar Hero III and played it a little bit.
• I got a plethora of wedding gifts that now need to be thanked for.

Now I get to do work around the house, finally.

Steamcloud

I ran across this news while writing up my previous post. It appears that Valve has gone and done exactly what I want for my gaming experience: the ability to have my savegames and configuration settings “in the cloud,” as it were, preventing me from transporting crap from computer to computer. Of course, Valve has an advantage in that it owns the Steam distribution platform, and has already provided the ability to download and play your games anywhere by logging in with your Steam account. This machine-ignorant purchasing and distribution network is just what the console platform holders need to get on board with. The machine on which I’m playing my games, whether a PC, Xbox, PS3, Wii, whatever, should not have to be special in any way for me to get at my games and data. It should be a commodity. A platform on top of which runs my game, into which I load my data. Thank you Gabe Newell for knowing what the hell is going on in this industry.

I seriously hope more folks get on the Steam train and distribute exclusively digital. Screw going to stores to buy games. My PC’s got gobs of free space, let’s use it up!

The ridiculousness of video game storage

The situation today with console game storage has gotten absolutely insane. “The Big Three” have made it so much more complex and inadequate than it ever should have been. Microsoft gives you a measly 20GB drive on their standard edition, 120GB if you want to overpay for it (or a whopping 0GB if you buy the “Arcade” version). Nintendo gives you only 512MB of built-in storage, infinitely expandable with flash memory cards if you want to futz around with those. Sony has provided a whole bunch of options throughout the first year (20, 40, 60, and 80GB models — complicated to the point of pointlessness), and has finally settled on 40 and 80. Why is storage such a difficult and largely ignored problem with video game consoles?

The obvious answer to this question is that the tiny cost associated with including extra built-in storage is enough for the platform holders to shy away from the idea completely, at the expense of the customer’s user experience. I understand that the grand majority of their customers probably never need more storage than what their savegames use, but myself and other gaming enthusiasts are not only the very vocal minority when it comes to gaming industry business blunders, but we’re also the coveted “attach rate” customers that pour money all over Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft by buying new games and content multiple times per month. So isn’t it in their interest to listen to us, at least sometimes?

Downloadable content is the guaranteed wave of the future. Rock Band has sold over 6 million songs, Steam is rolling along and crushing retail sales of many PC titles, and Nintendo has sold over 10 million Virtual Console games. Microsoft just recently upped the maximum XBLA game size to 350MB, HD movies are multiple gigs a piece, and added in-game content for some games can reach 1GB in size. With all of these methods of filling your available storage, why isn’t there a better solution?

With the PS3, a marginally savvy user can at least buy a bare 2.5″ SATA hard drive from a wholesaler and bump their storage up cheaply. That’s nice of Sony, but why can’t we just use external USB storage or something similar? Microsoft wants $100 for a 20GB drive, and $180 for a 120GB drive, with no way of expanding your capacity on your own. Nintendo offers no way to increase your primary storage, and even with flash memory cards, you can’t play games directly from them. You have to shift games around between external to internal storage before it’ll let you play them.

In a world where a gigabyte of disk-based storage costs an average of $0.58 [1], and flash-based storage about $4.90 [2], it’s incredible to me that these platform holders haven’t embraced that fact and opened up a little bit more to users adding their own storage if they won’t sell it to us built-in at a reasonable cost.

Another service that should be considered is web-based storage. Google provides me with over 6.5GB of web-based storage across my Google services: Gmail, Picasa, Docs, etc. Microsoft’s got 6GB for me sitting in my unused Hotmail account, why not utilize this for a cool Xbox Live feature? The portability of the data over the web would not only be phenomenal, but also integral to the advancement of the medium. I wish I could have access to my savegame data over the web so that:

• When I’m at a friend’s house playing Boom Blox, we can have access to all the unlocked stages as well as my homemade stages.
• I can play local multiplayer Super Smash Bros. Brawl somewhere else, and play any stage or character.
• When my Xbox hard drive dies, or my Wii is broken, or my DS games stolen, I’ll be confident that my history with games I’ve played is secure.

And how cool would it be if you could simply share out a save file and make it publicly accessible through a web service, like on Xbox.com, or PSN, or a Wii service (if one existed)? The same goes for recorded in-game content, a la “Saved Films” in Halo 3, or user-created skate. videos. Features like this could easily become staples in games, and cool ways to share experiences with your friends without having to actually play with them online.

Something’s gotta give soon. Rock Band alone has the potential to eventually take over your 360 hard drive with songs, if they keep releasing them at the same rate. And with the Wii version of Rock Band, Harmonix has had to resort to releasing standalone discs of extra songs you have to purchase, which negates the “pay for what you actually like” approach.

In the current console cycle, it’s too late to fix this storage issue. I just hope Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo give some serious thought to coming up with a solution for the next go-round. Now off the soapbox.

• 1. For the 2.5″ drive medium, which is what’s inside your Xbox 360 and PS3.
• 2. This pricing average is for SD storage, specifically. The only format the Wii uses.
• 3. Regarding 1 and 2, I went on Newegg.com and averaged the prices for the most popular medium-sized units, in terms of dollars per gigabyte. I’m so scientific.

Survival

The following is an entry into Steve’s Call To Arms on his blog, Fullbright.

Survival.

You’re a simple, essentially talentless man, waking up in the middle of the wilderness. In complete desolation. There may be no people within tens or hundreds or thousands of miles, you have no idea. Your objective is to reach something resembling civilization, be it a full-blown city, campsite, cave-dwelling natives… something.

You begin your trek armed with only some pocket items. You have your wristwatch, cell phone, wallet containing a few items, and maybe a candy bar. Because the wilderness is completely foreign to you (maybe you were previously a Wall Street investor), you have some serious things to learn if you wish to survive even the first few days. Feeding yourself will entail scrounging for berries or fruit initially, and as you collect some basic elements, you may even be able to fashion some primitive weapons. You’ll have to acquire clothing and create some form of shelter in order to stay healthy, otherwise exposure will weaken and possibly kill you. Clothing yourself might include killing an animal, cleaning it, and tanning hides or tailoring the fur into warmer garb.

Setting up camp will allow you to become more familiar with those immediate surroundings. This may pay off in the short term, allowing you to avoid danger and injury, but only in the short term. You must move along if you expect to truly survive. You absolutely will succumb to some uncontrollable force of nature eventually. A bear might rip you up in your sleep. So you camp for a few days and move on.

As you journey along in search of someone, you’re experiences will pay off. Hunting more often makes hunting easier and in turn keeps you well fed. Learning about plant life will allow you to gather more varied fruits. With blade-wielding talent you’ll more efficiently clean your kills providing better yield of hide, fur, or meat. Collecting firewood, climbing mountains… it all becomes easier with practice. Life in the wilderness can be exhilarating, frightening, fun, deadly. Climbing a sheer cliff face may get you a hundreds of feet above, providing a better vantage point to view your surroundings, a stunningly picturesque landscape, and access to whatever’s on the other side of the mountain. You’ll encounter rivers to cross, predators to evade, and if you’re lucky: signs of human life.

As you begin to run across signs of other travelers or settlers — old campfires, animal carcasses, beaten paths through the forest — you must use tracking and pathfinding skills to seek out the nearby civilization. But there’s another catch: they won’t necessarily be friendly. You’ll have to figure that out.

If you find friendlies, and they accept you into the fold, The End.

————

This game would be best if it played out over the course of dozens of hours, giving you time to learn the ropes of survival, as well as making new experiences in the wilderness all the more affecting. Of course since the world is completely open, you play at your pace. However, there is one absolute certainty: you will not last forever in the wild. You’ll do what’s necessary to survive, and sometimes that means it isn’t what you “want” to do. The player would experience hardship, cheat death, overcome adversity, and avoid disaster through becoming one with a foreign environment (without having to risk one’s real life in the bush).

Gaming Log — Week of May 18th, 2008

Last week’s gaming activity:

• I bought LostWinds on WiiWare and completed it in about two and a half hours. I had a great time with this one. Really simple, Zelda-like puzzles and fun platforming with the Wii Remote. My arm did get tired, though, pointing it at the screen for like 3 straight hours.
• Picked up Boom Blox over the weekend. Colette and I played some competitive “block throwing” for a while. Tons of fun. We also dabbled in the “jenga” mode a little bit last night, but not too much. And talk about tired arms… this game puts Wii Sports to shame in the arm-workout department.
• Played a few more missions in IV. I’m slowly chipping away to the center on this one. However, as Shawn from GWJ also mentioned, I’m kinda ready to be done with GTA. It’s not that I don’t like the game (I think it’s incredible). It’s just that after all the hours I’ve put into it, the core it still feels like another GTA game, which I’ve played 3 times already. The story is getting a little better, but I still maintain it’s nothing spectacular. Multiplayer is the only true “evolution” of this franchise.

This week: Boom Blox-aholism, Twilight Princess (that’s right, I still haven’t finished it), and maybe Penny Arcade, Episode 1?